Starting from NIL: Privacy focus of Nillion

This is a segment from the 0xResearch newsletter. To read full editions, subscribe.

---

After months of delay, Nillion has officially launched its mainnet — a milestone for one of crypto’s more technically-ambitious privacy networks.

Focused on the market for “blind compute,” Nillion hopes its architecture will unlock a new set of use-cases with long-term impact.

Alongside mainnet is the NIL token, which debuted today on exchanges, including Binance.

The mainnet was previously slated for February (under the moniker “Nilluary”), but the launch slipped into late March. “Good tech needs time to cook,” a team member quipped on the project’s Discord last month.

And this wasn’t the first time. Nillion marketing head Charlie Rogers previously wrote the mainnet delay was due to the fact that “the broader economic markets and the crypto industry have been filled with uncertainty and turmoil,” and urged that “during times of uncertainty, the best path forward is to keep building.”

That sounds like it could easily apply to the present day, but it was in August 2024!

At the time, Nillion’s community was already eagerly awaiting the release of NIL. The project has raised $50 million across VC and angel rounds since 2022.

But now the day has finally arrived. While only 19.5% of supply is circulating at launch — and a 48-month total unlock schedule — a full 80% is allocated to insiders or entities under their control.

The figures for early backers (21%) and core contributors (20%) are straightforward. Another 10% goes to “protocol development,” and 29% to “ecosystem and R&D” — both typically team-directed. That leaves 20% clearly earmarked for the community.

Unlock cliffs hit between months 6 and 12, followed by linear vesting. Most insider allocations will be substantially unlocked within three years.

Despite the typical vesting period, the structure skews toward early stakeholders, leaving an important question: Will the team deploy the ecosystem and community buckets in ways that meaningfully decentralize ownership — or will governance and value capture remain top-heavy?

‘Validator’ is a misnomer

Nillion isn’t a blockchain — it doesn’t rely on consensus to settle transactions or produce blocks. Instead, it’s a decentralized infrastructure for privacy-preserving computation.

Consequently, its validators’ nodes don’t validate transactions or reach consensus on a shared state like in Ethereum or Solana. Instead, their role is to jointly perform secure, distributed computations on encrypted data.

Its architecture is built around multi-party computation (MPC) — a cryptographic technique that allows multiple parties to jointly compute a function over private inputs, without ever revealing the inputs themselves.

Whereas most privacy networks in crypto focus on privacy in transaction layers (e.g., Zcash with zk-SNARKs, Monero with ring signatures, or Tornado Cash with mixers), Nillion targets off-chain compute privacy — enabling smart applications (e.g., AI inference, genomic analysis, financial modeling) to operate on encrypted data without decrypting it. This unlocks a different class of use cases beyond anonymous payments or shielded transfers.

So far, the mainnet supports an early wave of ecosystem projects. These include:

• Ritual, for blind AI inference;
• Skillful AI, a privacy-first AI assistant network;
• Salt, a financial application enabling confidential portfolio comparisons among wealth managers;
• Monadic DNA, for secure genomics analytics; and
• Soarchain, which lays claim to having processed over 130 million privacy-preserved data points from a global driving competition.

That said, access to the network remains tightly gated. Nillion’s node program ended in late 2024, and there are currently no plans to open validator participation. The current set of testnet validators remains closed, and community node operations are on pause. Developers can build on the network, but compute execution depends on approved infrastructure — a scaleability tradeoff for MPC networks.

For participants in Nillion’s 2024 CoinList Community Round, the vesting schedule is as follows:​

• Capped purchases: 5% of tokens unlock at the TGE (today), with the remaining 95% vesting linearly over six months.​
• Uncapped purchases: 25% of tokens unlocked, with the remaining 75% vesting monthly over the subsequent 24 months, completing by mid-March 2027.

Looking ahead, Nillion says it will focus on expanding its orchestration layer and building out tooling to make private computation more accessible. The long-term ambition is to become a generalized privacy layer for Web3 applications and beyond.

The question now is whether the network can translate its unique architecture into real-world traction — before the token unlocks start to ramp up. As of 12:00 p.m. ET, NIL is changing hands at about $0.74, giving Nillion a $750-million fully-diluted valuation.

---

Get the news in your inbox. Explore Blockworks newsletters:

• Blockworks Daily: Unpacking crypto and the markets.
• Empire: Crypto news and analysis to start your day.
• Forward Guidance: The intersection of crypto, macro and policy.
• 0xResearch: Alpha directly in your inbox.
• Lightspeed: All things Solana.
• The Drop: Apps, games, memes and more.
• Supply Shock: Bitcoin, bitcoin, bitcoin.